Before the phrase “Adventure Club” became the title of Laura Jane Graces electrifying and affirming new album, it was the name for her gaggle of adventurous friends in Greece. In the summer of 2024, Grace joined an artist residency program in Athens, embedding with Greek punk rockers there while she wrote songs about the sordid trials of her life and worldsobriety, autocracy, identity. By night, this new pickup band, including Graces wife and collaborator, Paris Campbell Grace, would often play and record. But by day, theyd explore the ancient and beautiful landscape and the citys vibrant culture. They dove from beaches nestled in seaside caves into the Aegean and swam with sea turtles. They submitted to tourism, seeing the Parthenon and Epidaurus and breaking into the Panathenaic Stadium to run its track. They became addicted to Freddo espresso, a locals-only iced coffee topped with whipped milk. The lifestyle of this Adventure Club inspired her so much that, by the time she left Greece, shed unexpectedly finished Adventure Club, a new career apogee built from equal parts fun and fury, self-definition and self-deprecation. It is all Grace, continuing to recalibrate what punk rock means for her now.

Two years ago, the Onassis Foundationlaunched a half-century earlier, after the shipping titan directed that his fortune be used to promote aid, progress and development following his deathinvited Grace to Greece. They wanted her to transform Walls, a century-old poem of isolation and doubt by Greeces Constantine P. Cavafy, into a song for a short documentary about inmates learning to express themselves through film while in prison. When she traveled there in early 2024, the filmmaker assembled a pick-up band of local punk rockers (plus Paris) for a string of shows. When the brief tour was done, bad weather delayed her flight home. Waiting for her early-morning exit, she stayed up all night with the ad hoc group and Paris. They recorded a new version of Walls, then flew home in a delighted daze.

Had that really just happened? Had she formed a transcontinental quartet, playfully dubbed the Trauma Tropes, with a Greek rhythm section shed just met? When she returned six months later after earning a full residency with the Onassis Foundation, the answer instantly became clear: Yes. Shed expected to maybe write an EP. Instead, she cowrote and cut an entire LP with Paris, bassist Jacopo Fokas, and drummer Orestis Lagadinos, that pickup group called The Trauma Tropes. Grace is happily a solo artist these days, a free agent who has moved among different configurations of musicians since her epochal punk band Against Me! began a break in 2020. The Trauma Tropes are less a new band, per se, than a group of new friends finding one another and inspiration in a surprising but right place and time.

Adventure Club is frequently a record about learning to take up space, about feeling free to be yourself as the bullshit of our ahistoric moment mounts. There is, for instance, the riotous Wearing Black, a thundering and hook-bound ode to being the punk or goth amid the rainbows, sparkles, and glitter of a massive Pride Parade. My prides a riot, she sings during this anthem of self-acceptance. Not a parade. There is I Love to Get High, a tragicomic blast about enjoying weed so much it no longer works but still trying, anyway. Grace is unapologetic about her choices, howling about dabs, diesel, and her beloved sticky joints as she waits for the next fix to hit. And then theres Fuck You Harry Potter, less a J.K. Rowling diss track than an inspired retelling of the moment when a soused Englishman at a bar near Graces St. Louis studio insisted that she reminded him of Eddie Redmayne. She went home and wrote this ripper.

Protest songs and personal tunes have never been a binary for Grace, and she delivers some of her most profoundand, yes, playfulwork ever at that particular intersection here. Written in the Onassis Foundations window-walled offices as tourists peered inside the fishtank, Your God (Gods Dick) is a hilarious, heretic, and brilliant excoriation of religious devotion, or of using Gods supposed words and ones belief in them to fuck your fellow citizens. A balancing act among Queen, L7, and Elton Motello, it is an instantly addictive tune, a should-be-hit that feels like a brazen test of the new rights alleged devotion to free speech. (Grace notably plays the Baglamas here, historically associated with Greek protest music, Rebetiko.) Like classic power-pop propelled by Oi!s revolutionary oomph, Mine Me Mine similarly lambastes endless capitalist avarice, or how it is used to manufacture suffering for others. And opener WWIII, a song Grace has been trying to perfect for years, is a call to solidarity against all these harmful forces, be they financiers or fascists. I dont want to die in World War III, Grace sings, like Bartleby staring into an impending apocalypse with a scowl. I dont want to kill for blood money.

But the most prominent thread through Adventure Clubs dozen tracks is one of evolution, of letting yourself become something new. In Graces case, that is sometimes reckoning with so-called California sobriety. The hardest part of getting sober/is pouring yourself out of the bottle, she sings alongside Paris on New Years Day during one of the albums most poignant moments. It is a theme song for the ever-renewing possibility of always trying again. Its not unlike Active Trauma, really, a stomping number about recognizing that you can never outrun the past (even if, as Grace half-jokes, you actually run to attempt just that). You may, however, be able to overpower it, to burn this house to the fucking ground. The other side of this evolution is Grace simply giving herself space to have fun, as with the caffeinated hijinks of Espresso Freddie, penned alongside bassist Fokas. Isnt growing up, again and again, the real Adventure Club, anyway?

Grace talks often about her age, about nearing the second half of her 40s after a lifetime as a punk. What does it mean, really, to remain a punk for 44 years? For Grace, it is the same as its always beena resolve to question everything about oneself and the world around you and to allow yourself to evolve within that framework. Adventure Club epitomizes that spirit the way that the best of Laura Jane Graces music always has. The young punk from Florida may never have imagined making a record in Greece, but it does not change the spirit of the songs that inspired them: to create a place where were all burdened by less bullshit, whether its our own baggage or the stuff that autocrats, capitalists, and assholes simply want to put on us because they dont know the thrill of being happy and free themselves. Maybe they need to try writing a rock song, or simply jump into the sea.

Laura Jane Grace/ Vocals, Guitar
Paris Campbell Grace/ Vocals
Jacopo “Jack” Fokas/ Bass Guitar, Vocals
Orestis Lagadinos/ Drums, Vocals

Additional backing vocals by Chiristina Blioumpa & Georgia Kollyra

Recorded at Villa Giusseppe, Piraeus, Greece
Engineered and Mixed by Jackopo Fokas
Additional Engineering by Konstantinos Ragiadakos & Marios Adamopoulos
Produced by Laura Jane Grace, Jacopho Fokas & the Onassis Foundation
Executive Producer / Christos Sarris
Mastered by Jason Livermore at the Blasting Room
Artwork by Bassment Rats

All songs written by Laura Jane Grace, Total Treble Music BMI, Rough Trade Publishing

“Wearing Black” & “I Love To Get High” Written By Laura Jane Grace & Paris Campbell Grace
“Espresso Freddie” written by Laura Jane Grace & Jacopo Fokas
“Poison In Me” written by Laura Jane Grace & Jacocopo Fokas
“Walls” Is Original Music by Laura Jane Grace featuring an English adaptation and expansion by Laura Jane Grace of the poem “Walls” by CP Cavafy